Abandoned by top aides and choked by legal woes, Silvio Berlusconi’s defeat in a showdown with Prime Minister Enrico Letta on Wednesday was seen by analysts as a sign of his terminal decline.

“I think we are seeing the final chapter of Berlusconi’s political life,” Giacomo Marramao, a politics professor at Roma Tre University, told AFP after a dramatic confidence vote in Parliament.

“The result is less credibility, a decline in credibility,” Marramao said, pointing to the divisions within Berlusconi’s once fiercely loyal center-right People of Freedom (PDL) party. “A post-Berlusconi party was born today,” he said. After two decades in politics, the bombastic tycoon cut an increasingly lonely figure as one by one his lieutenants broke ranks to support the government. As Berlusconi left the Senate chamber after his spectacular U-turn from trying to topple Letta’s government to supporting it in a parliamentary confidence vote, a crowd of protesters chanted “Go away!” Even before his shock turnaround, analysts said his confusing statements showed powerlessness. “He seems a bit like a shadow of his former self,” said Stefano Folli, a columnist for the Il Sole 24 Ore business daily, describing a poignant “human drama inside the political drama” for the embattled three-time former prime minister. Filippo Ceccarelli in leftist daily La Repubblica even compared Wednesday to July 25, 1943 when dictator Benito Mussolini was formally deposed in a vote by the Grand Council of Fascism. “An entire world is falling down,” he said. The real threat to Berlusconi’s career, however, comes not from humiliation in Parliament where he has bounced back before but from his many and increasingly serious legal woes, analysts said. “He doesn’t have complete control of his party any more but he does still hold a lot of weight,” said James Walston, a professor in international relations at the American University of Rome.

Berlusconi this month is set to be expelled from his senate seat and barred from running in the next elections following his first definitive criminal conviction for tax fraud in August. He is also appealing a seven-year prison sentence for having sex with an underage prostitute and for abuse of office when he was prime minister, as well as a one-year sentence for leaking a police wiretap to damage a rival.